‘Perth felt like a peripheral place not just physically but in a lot of other conceptual ways. Peripheral in a positive way, implying great possibility and opportunity, a certain license to muck about in the backyard, invent your own meaning without great consequence. I often wonder if I would have felt as liberated growing up in a bigger city, surrounded by a more self-consciously artistic culture or family – maybe not.’
Shaun Tan, Suburban Odyssey
I’m meeting a friend for a beer in The Print Hall, one of the bars and restaurants that are part of the transformation of Brookfield Place on St Georges Terrace. Newspaper House and the WA Trustee and Royal Insurance buildings remain clustered at the foot of Brookfield Tower, the new branch office of BHP Billiton and a skyscraper that predictably reflects the monumentalism of a global mining giant.
The Western Australian economy has doubled in size over the past two decades, but unlike during the flashy 1980s, when the wealth was largely paper money and its projections onto the city seemed both lazy and insensible to issues of identity, of late there appears to be a more considered attention to design and an eye to permanence rather than a quick buck. The costs involved in the restoration of Newspaper House and its neighbouring buildings, now home to upscale bar and dining venues the Heritage and the Trustee, must have been considerable. These buildings were derelict for many years, and there’s evidence of both a painstaking attention to detail and gold-rush extravagance at the Trustee, of a kind not seen perhaps since the days of John De Baun and Claude de Bernales. The custom-made solid pewter bar weighs in at an incredible twenty kilograms a linear metre.
Inside Newspaper House, the high ceiling of the atrium and the tabloid-shaped windows flood the hall with a crisp light. The print-room odours of molten lead, hot ink and heated paper have been replaced by the hoppy scent of boutique beer in elegant glasses, freshly shucked oysters and mullet toasties. It’s the time of year when the heat and winds are receding, coming into my favourite season. The high-contrast summer light has softened, too, and everything has taken on a crystalline definition.
Ask many Perth expatriates what they miss about the city and the answer is often the light. It’s not a romantic or a nostalgic light, not the playground light of our childhoods, but a light so clean and sharp that it feels like an instrument of grace, seeing a new world with new eyes. Because the days are cooler, and the sun warms rather than burns, the pleasure in the air means that it’s almost impossible not to be happy. Days like this remind me of Nyungar man Barry McGuire’s comment that the reason Perth is so relaxed, so ‘wait a while’ and seemingly at peace with itself, so quiet and still at night, is because the songs of this place are still being sung, the place is still being ‘looked after’, even if not many people know this.
It doesn’t surprise me to hear that in the Nyungar language there are different words to describe the different qualities of the local light – the warming, glowing morning light (biirnaa-ba) that shone down on us the previous week, for example, seated on iron chairs at an outdoor restaurant overlooking the river. It also doesn’t surprise me to learn that according to the Nyungar dreaming, light once encompassed everything; everything started with the light. Barry explains how, in a time when every bird, animal, rock and tree shone with its own internal radiance, the trickster moon convinced the kangaroo to reveal the name of its sacred illumination, and in doing so the kangaroo became separated from it. This fall from grace started a chain reaction. As the moon went about stealing the light of everything, darkness was introduced into the world, even as the moon became brighter. Now light only exists alongside darkness, although the daytime light is still the pure expression of that sacred illumination.
The Print Room bar is packed with an office crowd of lawyers, public servants and executive types. There’s a strong whiff of money in the room, but it’s still a Perth gathering: informal and a bit raucous, no neckties or power suits. We admire the refurbishment of the hall, designed to replicate the pages of a book, each room containing a differently themed restaurant and bar, but there’s plenty of original detail left over from its previous incarnation as the home of The West Australian. The conversation turns naturally to the newspaper, Australia’s second longest running and now a monopoly daily, and some of the characters and personalities in some of the rival papers going back to the nineteenth century.
Most of the early Swan River colonists tended to restrict their writing to diaries, or memoir, absorbed as they were in trying to make sense of their new environment. There wasn’t much written about Perth in the form of poetry or fiction until the twentieth century, and this was generally published in the local newspaper. As a result, the story of personal and political expression in Perth was played out most strongly in the often short-lived newspapers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. In competing with The West Australian, and before that its ancestor, The Perth Gazette, these papers tended to attract extreme personalities. One of the first was the ‘stormy petrel’ William Nairne Clark, another young Scotsman who emigrated to the colony. After a duel fought in Fremantle in which he killed his opponent, the lawyer by trade saw an opportunity for a contrarian voice in the media. The mouthpiece of the government, The Perth Gazette, printed things like the following, in reference to a Nyungar who’d stolen a ram: ‘A trial of this notorious offender would appear to us unnecessary, as it would incur expenses to the colony and much inconvenience to the prosecutors’ (in other words, Goordap should be shot without trial). However, Clark’s Swan River Guardian counter-punched with statements such as this: ‘No sophistry can conceal the fact that Western Australia is a conquered Nation, but still another fact stares us in the face; that we … must abide by the consequences of that first act of aggression which was sanctioned by the British Government.’
The idea that the Nyungar were somehow justified in evincing ‘their repugnance by a thousand acts of hostility’ was predictably not a popular one. Clark’s various assaults on a government that brayed like a donkey ‘from its rear’ meant that the Swan River Guardian’s life was cut short. Clark eventually left the colony for Hobart.
Of the many newspapers that sprang up after the Guardian, some were sober journals and some were mouthpieces for their editors’ opinions, focused on conducting bitter personal rivalries with other editors. These feisty rags must have provided an entertainment of sorts, because some of them lasted for a considerable time and gave rise to the careers of men such as John Curtin, Frederick Vosper, Charles Harper and John Winthrop Hackett.
There was seemingly room enough for everyone in the newspaper business of the late nineteenth century, as long as you were male, had a thick hide and a keen sense of humour. My local newspaper, The Fremantle Herald, was started in 1867 by three ex-convicts and tailored to appeal to a largely working-class audience. The three editors used the forum to critique the convict system and challenge the ruling elites up in Perth, but like many papers of the time it also included local poetry and prose. This was before political hopeful John Horgan named and shamed what he called the ‘six hungry families’ of Perth, as part of his unsuccessful attempt to get elected to the state government’s upper house, the Legislative Council. Horgan felt that these families and their kind ruled to further their own interests, while ignoring the plight of the more numerous. Horgan was sued for libel and fined the significant sum of £500. But Horgan ran for parliament again two years later and successfully defeated one member of the ‘hungry six’ by a handful of votes. He drove the eight-hour-a-day agenda but there was little he could do to undermine the sense of entitlement of the older families.
The Perth newspapers seemed to attract many from the first wave of migration from the eastern states who, like Horgan, brought with them a welcome dose of radicalism and fearlessness. The most notorious and fondly remembered is the distinctively tall and pale Cornishman Frederick Vosper, who was one of the best-known faces in Perth at the time. In the era of the ubiquitously bearded and moustachioed European male, Vosper’s cleanly shaved jawline, long black hair, sharp nose and dark clothes made him stand out from his peers. Before coming to Western Australia, Vosper had been imprisoned in Queensland as one instigator of a strikers’ riot. He had earlier suggested, in print, that Charters Towers shearers ought to let their oppressors ‘feel cold lead and steel; as they have starved you, so do you shoot them’. As an inmate, his head had been shaved, and he’d vowed never to cut his hair again.
Vosper made a name for himself in the goldmining regions of Cue and Coolgardie, with his trade-union politics and his ability to rouse a crowd and cut down hecklers and fools. His response to being asked ‘What is alluvial, anyhow?’ was to reply that the questioner should ‘Go home, my man, and have a really good bath. After you have done so, let the water run off you, and have a look at the result. That is alluvial.’
When Vosper was elected as an independent to the state government’s lower house, the Legislative Assembly, he moved to Perth, married a widow and drew on her money to start up The Sunday Times. Among other things, he used the paper as a mouthpiece to hound John Forrest for what he saw as ducking the issue of better representation for the miners of Coolgardie. Vosper had exploited the vehicle of an earlier newspaper to attack what he called Forrest’s ‘makeshift devices and supine, spineless ideas of statecraft’, as well as the cosy relationship of rival paper The West Australian with Forrest’s government. Unlike Horgan before him, however, Vosper achieved some significant wins in parliament, including the introduction of a minimum wage for state-contracted workers and a successful inquiry into the treatment of female inmates at Fremantle Asylum. He died aged thirty-one of acute appendicitis and is remembered both as a political reformer and the leader of the attacks that felled C.Y. O’Connor, as a man Vosper considered too close to Forrest.
By the early twentieth century, future prime minister John Curtin was another actively engaged in the sometimes brutal world of Perth journalism, as editor of the Westralian Worker. Victorian by birth, Curtin had gone to jail for his anti-conscription activities during World War I, and his mentor Frank Anstey had convinced him that the imagined quieter waters of Perth would be beneficial to Curtin’s health and career. Like many successful adoptees of Perth, Curtin assimilated into the suburbs, living in a small cottage in Cottesloe from where he caught the train to work every day. Despite being defeated after one term in Fremantle by an independent candidate and local butcher, Bill Watson (evidence of Perth’s enduring preference for strong local personalities rather than party-political candidates), Curtin was a great bridge-builder and organiser, and he did a lot to forge a stronger link between the industrial and political wings of the Labor Party in the 1920s. But in his early years as a doctrinaire socialist, penning editorials that included such phrases as ‘the bowed back of labour can expect to have the stinging lash of unemployment applied unrelentingly’, Curtin wasn’t above the kind of petty (if sometimes amusing) name-calling that seems to characterise the period. One such spat occurred between Curtin and J.J. Simons, founder of the Young Australia League (YAL), who together with Victor Courtney had started up The Mirror in 1922.
Ron Davidson’s loving biography of the newspaper, High Jinks at the Hot Pool: The Mirror Reflects the Life of a City, describes how Simons and Courtney’s paper filled a niche by supplying Perth citizens with up-to-date sporting results but also gossip and innuendo. Robert Drewe, in The Shark Net, describes witnessing his father lurking suspiciously by the incinerator in their suburban backyard, ‘reading avidly’ through The Mirror before consigning the ‘sex and scandal sheet’ to the flames. But it wasn’t always so, at least not until the editors (one of whom was later Ron Davidson’s father) figured out that sex and scandal in a buttoned-down and largely blue-collar city kept the readers coming back.
J.J. Simons was not only a part owner of the ‘clean dirty’ paper The Mirror but also a Labor parliamentarian with the nickname of ‘Boss’. He was also adept at marrying his political message with his editorial agenda, one that was often about ‘the villainy of his many personal enemies’. He engaged with Curtin over the matter of Simons’ own resignation from the party, the result of what he considered to be the machinations of a ‘secret junta.’ Curtin felt that Simons was determined to make a martyr of himself, and he ran the front page of the Worker with a headline spread over three columns: THE LATEST AND GREATEST OF ALL THE MARTYRS! SOME REFLECTIONS CON-CERNING A SWOLLEN HEAD …’ and an article that hinted at Simons’ mercenary reasons for abandoning his post and splitting the Labor vote, ending with ‘Too much prosperity is not always a good thing, as witness, that of the tapeworm – JC’. According to Ron Davidson, Simons hit back immediately by labelling Curtin ‘the wobbly worker’, a reference to his drinking problem, and ‘the journalistic odour from the Yarra’.
Alfred Deakin had seen Simons’ public speaking and had tipped him as a future prime minister. In a measure of the levels of political engagement at the time, Simons attracted crowds of 2000 people to his rallies in East Perth, within a total constituency of only 5000 voters, but it wasn’t enough to get him elected. He withdrew to build Araluen, in memory of his beloved mother, now a popular park in the Perth hills, and to run the YAL and The Mirror, from where he could safely take pot-shots at his enemies.
Courtney and Simons’ approach had been made clear in an earlier incarnation of the paper, The Call, which had baited the mayor of Perth at the time, William Lathlain, for his sycophancy towards the crown and favouring of conscription, among other things. They were sued for libel, although the jury only awarded the mayor a farthing in damages. The following week, according to Ron Davidson, the ‘Call featured its peace offering – a big picture of Lathlain wearing a mayoral chain of farthings’. It’s a very funny picture, with the farthings prominent beneath the mayor’s stern and unsuspecting stare, and must have driven Lathlain mad with frustration.
Part of The Mirror’s success was its use of humour to cock a snook at the pretensions of what then passed for high society in Perth, as well as to ‘suppress the suppressionists’: the killjoys and wowsers who pontificated about morality from the pulpits and lecterns and court benches but, if the editors of The Mirror are to believed, were also given to boozy orgies whenever the opportunity arose. The Mirror’s readers loved to hear about Bacchanalian goings-on in suburban Peppermint Grove among the ‘naicest’ families, ‘the shameful doings of the Swagger set’, or ‘the Pseudo Western Aristocrats of Booze’, as evidence of hypocrisy from on high.
The West Australian claimed to be a paper of record, whereas The Mirror stories ‘came from the courts, with murders … a specialty; from people oppressed by silly governments and bureaucratic bunglers; from germ ridden restaurants; and from the roving and quirky eyes of the paper’s reporters’. While Davidson casts a clear eye on the early tendency of the paper to opine at the expense of non-whites, in particular the imagined sexual allure of the ‘Celestials’, the stories in The Mirror ranged from images such as ‘STRANGE SIGHT NEAR CAUSEWAY … A man, his wife and their small boy, armed with an axe apiece, were seen hacking into the carcass of a draught horse, stuck in the mud flats at the city’s edge’ to stories about lurking males in overcoats and female suburban streakers with ‘CYCLING LADY GODIVA STREAKS THROUGH SUBIACO/YOUNG MEN STARTLED AS SHE WHIPS OPEN HER COAT’ (when truthful material was short). Detailed coverage of society murders became the paper’s greatest attraction, so that after a taxi-driver’s murder on Westana Road in suburban Dalkeith, this main thoroughfare was renamed Waratah Avenue to remove the stain brought upon the desirable new suburb by The Mirror’s relentless coverage.
But the editors and journalists of the paper at least practised what they appeared to preach, that is, their celebration of the city’s underdog characters. One of The Mirror’s more successful pranks involved Percy Button, a well-known street acrobat and cadger about town, famously grubby and often charged with vagrancy for performing in front of the well-heeled crowd in queues outside His Majesty’s Theatre in the CBD. The Mirror staff allowed Button to wash and often fed him in the alley beside their Murray Street offices. On one occasion in 1929, the staff journos cleaned him up, dressed him in a tuxedo, gave him a fine cigar and perched him on the stairs at His Majesty’s Theatre, the site of many of his arrests. ‘Do you know this man?’ the paper’s readers were asked, above a front-page photograph of the anonymous ‘Perth silvertail’, with a prize offered for the correct answer. Predictably, the paper’s respondents identified him variously as the Prince of Wales, the Lieutenant Governor and the Duke of Cumberland, among others. ‘Clothes maketh the man,’ the paper wryly observed the following week when Percy’s identity was revealed, which led in turn to The Mirror defending Button when he was next arrested for vagrancy and labelled by the presiding judge as a ‘filthy disreputable sight’.
When Button was bashed by two policemen near Cottesloe Beach in 1931 for being a ‘dirty looking cur’ and then put before the mercy of the same judge, The Mirror was there to give Percy’s side of the story. He wanted to earn his living his own way, as a ‘handspring artist’ and bottle collector, and besides, it was the Depression years and there was no work to be found. He was a returned soldier, who’d served with the AIF in 1917. The judge gave Percy one month’s hard labour.
Another local character celebrated by The Mirror was Ernest ‘Shiner’ Ryan. He’d emigrated from Frog Hollow in Sydney, where, in 1914, he pulled off Australia’s first armed robbery and getaway in a car. Shiner had spent a lot of his adult life in prison, and he added to his total in Fremantle. Ryan became a Fremantle legend, in a town ‘crammed with characters’. Author Xavier Herbert, then working in a Fremantle pharmacy, described the port city as a place where:
The narrow streets seemed always to be thronged … The town itself was no less colourful than its waterfront, peopled as it largely was by seafarers and globetrotters that the ships of half a century had left behind. The packed shops and restaurants, the wine bars, pubs, hash-houses, whore-houses, doss-houses, were run by people of all breeds … Of nights the bars fumed and roared, the drunks bawled and brawled and wept and puiked, the Salvos and their Brethren banged their drums…
Shiner Ryan was Fremantle’s preeminent lock-picker, able to pick a lock with his hands behind his back so that he could stand innocently facing the street while leaning back against the shopfront. Unfortunately, because he was so expert, any time there was a clean robbery of goods rather than a ‘break-in’, the police only had to check whether Shiner was out of prison. While in jail he got into trouble for forging coins that one of the warders passed over the pubs of Fremantle, although he became the first person to get the prison clock over the entrance gates to run on time. The Fremantle Prison museum still has two model white sailing ships (which are quite shimmeringly beautiful) that Shiner made of leftover porridge, ground glass and salt crystals.
Ron Davidson’s father, Frank, interviewed Shiner often, on one occasion about a painting Shiner had done of Jesus, standing in the prison’s no-man’s land between cell-block and watch-tower, holding a lamb, except that ‘it was a black lamb bearing Shiner’s naughty schoolboy face’. The painting took Shiner back to Sydney, where a ‘Sydney art authority’ lauded it as a significant work. There he renewed his acquaintance with childhood sweetheart and Sydney identity Kate Leigh, who’d done five years for Shiner after perjuring herself to give him an alibi. The Mirror was there to welcome Kate when she arrived in Perth to take up Shiner’s marriage proposal, ‘an ageing woman … in a giant straw hat, with fifteen diamond rings and a silver fox’. Midway through the celebrations, a teacher dropped in from the South Terrace Primary School with a request that Shiner pick a lock whose key had gone missing. The newlyweds got into a taxi for the long drive over to Sydney, although the story goes that sixty-four-year-old Shiner only lasted 350 kilometres before he ‘did a bunk through a public toilet, stole a car and returned to familiar Fremantle’. When Shiner Ryan died in 1957, aged seventy-one, Fremantle mayor Sir Frederick Samson was a pallbearer at his funeral. Kate Leigh, upon hearing the sad news, provided Shiner’s epitaph, according to The Mirror: ‘His brain was in his fingertips. He could open any lock with a coat hanger.’
Neither did The Mirror take the moral high ground when it came to describing the return to Perth of brothel-madam Josie de Bray, who’d been trapped in France and interrogated by the Gestapo during World War II. The brothels on Roe Street in central Perth, alongside the train tracks, had a long history. They were mainly small weatherboard cottages, except for Josie’s, which was a ‘custom-built villa with a piano in the vestibule’ that Ron Davidson’s Uncle Fred, a high-profile SP bookie, used to play when he felt the urge, since he wasn’t allowed to play his grand piano at home. Wearing a Maurice Chevalier hat, he’d sing show tunes to the revellers and waiting customers. The brothels were built on Commonwealth rather than state land, with both the Perth Central Police station and The Mirror offices a mere couple of minutes’ walk away.
During World War II, with the presence of thousands of American sailors, Roe Street was quarantined from the gaze of passing train passengers, after the Mothers Union successfully argued for hoardings to be put up to remove the view of scantily clad women sitting on the brothel verandas. Roe Street was such a part of 1930s Perth life that when Josie de Bray, the most famous of the madams, took a poulterer who’d set up shop beside ‘Josie’s Bungalow’ to court for disturbing her custom (the sound of chickens being beheaded tended to cool the ardour of her clients), the judge ordered the poulterer to move and fined him £2.
Such was de Bray’s authority that during her twelve-year absence, when her Roe Street brothel-keepers and accountant didn’t know whether she was alive or dead, they reliably paid their rent and her commission each week. A terrific sum of money awaited de Bray upon her return. She had once warned a youthful Victor Courtney that ‘You know, son, working on a newspaper is a dirty way to earn a living’, but when The Mirror quoted her as saying that she intended to celebrate her return at the races, the paper was inundated with vitriolic letters because it dared to treat someone in the sex trade as a real person. The Mirror had crossed the line, and the ‘fearful fifties’ were upon Perth.
The one recurring theme from my conversations with men and women from a Perth generation now in their seventies and eighties, who grew up in the city before the wave of new immigration in the 1960s, and before the advent of television, is the celebration of the city’s characters and the importance of local storytellers. I was lucky enough to have a grandfather who was both a great raconteur and singer, and he could tell stories about the people of Perth for hours, becoming earthier and funnier as the night wore on. Perth may have been geographically and to some extent culturally isolated, but there were the older traditions to maintain community memories of the characters who peopled the city, as though their difference was somehow the proudest expression of the city that produced them.
I occasionally have lunch at The Buffalo Club on High Street in Fremantle, one of the last places in the city to serve pony glasses of beer. The club manager, Leo Amaranti, himself in his eighties, takes me upstairs to look at what is essentially a shrine to one Perth eccentric, a man with the nickname of ‘Matches’. Matches was a street person who collected burnt matches off footpaths and barroom floors to make his minor sculptural creations. Eventually Leo, who is quite the character himself, put Matches to work with an unlimited supply of his favourite material. The result was two huge benches and high-back thrones made of matchsticks, shellacked a golden honey colour; the blocks of burnt sticks are arranged in parquetry formations that give the surfaces a three-dimensional effect. It’s a wonderful piece of outsider art with an important function – the thrones and benches have always been used for official Buffalo Club meetings. Beside Matches’ creation stands a heavy curved wooden bar liberated from the Aga Khan’s luxury suite at a nearby hotel in 1987, following his visit to watch the America’s Cup. The story of how the club members transported the bar from the suite across town and into the secondfloor hall is an epic in itself.
In the window of the bar downstairs is a short narrative penned by Vince Lovegrove, who sang with Bon Scott in The Valentines during the 1960s. He and Scott were still teenagers, with Scott working as a postie and Lovegrove employed in a local menswear store. During their lunch-breaks, according to Lovegrove, they’d meet in the stands of the South Fremantle football club and ‘plot and scheme about how we’d take over the planet and be the biggest band in the world … but in the end, it was really about finding out where we fit in.’ Lovegrove, who went on to a career in journalism, television production and managing bands, including AC/DC, Cold Chisel and Divinyls, was the person who later introduced Scott to Angus Young and Malcolm Young in Adelaide. The brothers were looking for a singer for their band, AC/DC, and Scott ‘fitted in’ so well that, of course, the rest is history.
Writers Niall Lucy and John Kinsella, in their recent collaboration, The Ballad of Moondyne Joe, take J.B. O’Reilly’s 1879 novel Moondyne as a starting point from which to examine the meaning associated with the life of Joseph Bolitho Johns, by way of ‘a work of the imagination informed by conversations on history, literature, philosophy and AC/DC’. Using a mixture of poetry, parody and reflection, the life of Moondyne Joe is drawn into broader discussions about colonisation, crime and punishment, and rebellion in Perth, demonstrating how Joseph Johns the historical figure can never be separated from the mythologised Moondyne Joe, the subject of song, photography, fiction and film (a feature film was made of Moondyne in 1913, although only the script that Lucy discovered survives). The authors discuss Moondyne Joe and Yagan, the Nyungar warrior, and Bon Scott, whose importance to recent Perth generations as a renegade figure approaches that of Moondyne Joe before him.
With the exception of Yagan, who was incarcerated at the Roundhouse Prison and then Carnac Island, what links O’Reilly and Moondyne Joe and Bon Scott is Fremantle Prison, something captured in the spirited cadences of AC/DC’s song ‘Jailbreak’. While Scott was only incarcerated there briefly as a minor before being transferred to a juvenile correctional facility to serve an eight-month sentence (for carnal knowledge of a minor and stealing petrol), the link between the other names – one that ensures their enduring cultural meaning in Perth – is the way that each thumbed his nose at the authorities, escaped custody and survived on the run.
One of my Fremantle locals is a pub called Moondyne Joe’s. The dining room wall carries the 1874 photograph of Joseph Bolitho Johns that most people associate with his name. In it, he stands cheerfully dressed in workman’s boots and trousers, wearing a well-used kangaroo cloak and carrying an adze. His hair is long and his eyes are friendly; his bearded face is set in a bemused smile. The fist that grasps the adze is strong and large, the hand of a workman. What’s unusual is that the photographer, Alfred Chopin, took another photograph of Joe dressed in an immaculate suit, with a dandy’s watch-chain, one hand stiffly on his hip and the other on the back of a bentwood chair. Joe’s expression in this second, and largely unknown, photograph contains the same patrician rectitude of the many photographs of local Fremantle ‘Merchant Princes’ taken during the same period. That Perth has preferred the image of ‘Wild Joe’, the man who is alleged to have stripped off his clothes when in confinement, armed with an iron-age weapon, dressed in the kangaroo skin (the buka, or boka) of the Nyungar, suggests a preference in the culture for both the nostalgic perspective of a vanished frontier and the celebratory view of a very human hero, a very Perth hero, perhaps – much like Bon Scott nearly a century later. Littered with flowers and empty whisky bottles, Scott’s gravesite at Fremantle Cemetery has become something of a shrine amid the loose grey sands that also contain the remains of Moondyne Joe.
One of my near neighbours in Fremantle, K, a man in his sixties, notices my four-year-old son’s black AC/DC shirt and dutifully reminds me that the thirty-second anniversary of Bon Scott’s death is approaching. While Luka and K’s grandson play with Jess, K’s border collie, K says he makes sure to take his grandson to Bon’s grave on the same day every year, and that he’s not the only one. The numbers get bigger each year, he tells me, and plenty of them are grandparents taking their grandchildren along to show them Bon’s grave and to ‘show Bon his legacy’. K is a working man, not usually given to sentimentality. Perhaps overcome with the emotion of the looming anniversary, he shyly asks if he can show me something and proceeds to peel off his shirt to reveal a new tattoo of Bon on his upper arm. The lifelike Bon smiles the same mischievous smile he’s often remembered by, one mirrored in the photographic portrait of Moondyne Joe, clutching an adze not a micro-phone, but with that same ironic glint in his eye.
In the six months before Fremantle Prison was closed in 1991, its medieval conditions highlighted by an earlier riot on a day when the temperature in the cells reached 47°C, the prison superintendent decided that art would no longer be regarded as merely a tool of control used to reward good behaviour. The traditional lock-down regime was relaxed and inmates were allowed to paint the walls of their cell and exercise yard as they pleased. The resulting artwork forms a permanent exhibition of the end of an occupation before withdrawal, telling of the different yearnings, the comic and tragic inscriptions of the incarcerated in the different divisions.
In the 3 Div exercise yard, which contained prisoners generally sentenced for violent crimes, there is a chilling but comically rendered floor-to-ceiling mural in lurid colours called ‘Wayne and Willie’s Swimming Lesson’. It depicts a river of blood, a rape scene, some mates drinking in a bar, a robbery in progress, a woman being dragged off by her hair. This image captures most people’s worst fears regarding the minds of prisoners, the callous cycle of life of the recidivist criminal. But this painting is a minority in the broader gallery of paintings, sketches and scrawls. In the nearby cells there are the usual male and female genitalia painted around the teardrop-shaped judas holes in the heavy iron doors, needing only the guard’s gaze to complete the satirical effect. There is the usual graffiti that like prisoner tattoos carries a coded language understood by initiates: spider webs suggesting entrapment; tear drops; Dali clocks with missing hands; burning candle stubs, especially in the cell of Bobbie Thornton, the state’s first accredited tattooist, who ran a homemade tattoo machine with naked wires plugged directly into the mains power.
Over the wall from the 3 Div exercise yard is the identical exercise yard of 4 Div. It mostly housed lifers, many of whom had been on death row until 1984, when capital punishment was finally abolished. The artwork of the lifers is different from that of the short-term violent offenders. Gone is the cruel humour, replaced by a quietly reflective water mural painted by Peter Cameron, a Yamatji man, and Shane Finn and Erik Merrett. Although funding has lately been secured to protect the paintings from further damage, over the years the water mural has been slowly destroyed by damp. Its hauntingly beautiful portrait of water spirits from different Countries – the Wagyl, the Wand-jina and Cameron’s own characteristic water spirit – still covers the entire eastern wall of the yard. Cameron and Finn (who became a friend after I met him while teaching poetry at Casuarina Prison over three years) shared a slot on the highest floor of the division, and the walls and door are also covered with their vivid, charged and symbolically coded artwork. Beneath the whitewash in a cell across the row were discovered paintings done in the 1870s by convict James Walsh, now preserved behind Perspex screens. The paintings are classically influenced drafts of mainly biblical subjects and hint at the decorative work he did later in the prison chapel; they are quite different, though, from the paintings he created after his release, when he became one of the noted watercolourists in the colony.
In another nearby cell is a floor-to-ceiling painting by Kimberley man Reggie Moolarvie from the 1980s, an image of his home Country depicted in painstakingly stippled brushstrokes, a pointillist landscape clearly influenced by his time in Nyungar Country, with the characteristic ‘Carrolup School’ use of saturated pigments and melancholic/mystical hues. It fills the cell with a heartbreaking beauty and nostalgia, a fourth wall that works as a window onto another world. Despite the comings and goings of countless other inmates, black and white, the image was left unharmed for nearly a decade after Moolarvie’s release; some thirty years later it remains in good condition.
But it is in another cell that the discourses of punishment and control, and artistic expression, are brought into clearest relief. On the ground floor of 3 Div, in a darkened space in a claustrophobically small slot, is a floor-to-window Nyungar landscape painted by Les Quartermaine in the Carrolup style. In the darkness of the slot the painting exudes a poignant light, an image of open forest that captures what Peter Cowan called the ‘individuality, the strangeness and beauty’ of the south-west landscape, the characteristic fluidity of the self-aware trees with their delicately rendered foliage, the darkness and depth in the foreground retreating beneath layers of soft light that carry so much feeling.
Quartermaine had been an inmate of Carrolup Native Mission in the Great Southern. One important difference between Carrolup and the Moore River mission came when Noel White arrived at Carrolup in 1945 to take up the position of headmaster. White encouraged his charges to go into the bush and paint what they saw. This wasn’t without its difficulties, and White was often stymied by locals demanding the labour of the children, and officials who couldn’t see the merit in teaching art to Nyungar kids. Either way, the initiative resulted in a body of work with a distinctive style characterised by a focus on landscape (at a time when Namatjira was a household name) and a richly textured palette of colours that captured something of the numinous qualities of a metaphysical Country. A selection of the ‘Child Artists of the Australian Bush’ toured Europe and ended up in collections worldwide, although the inmates were officially wards of the state and weren’t allowed to receive any financial gain from their work.
The style has influenced many contemporary Nyungar artists, from Tjulliyungu Lance Chad to Christopher Pease, whose Nyoongar Dreaming depicts a human figure hemmed in by street-signs and poles and concrete barricades beneath an algae-coloured sky. Tjulliyungu Lance Chad, who has used the Carrolup style to depict the Swan River and the salt-eaten landscapes to be found in many places beyond Perth, also created a Carrolup-influenced landscape to form the cyclorama for the tragi-comic theatrical production Binjareb Pinjarra about the Pinjarra Massacre. In 1833, for an hour and a half, twenty-four armed soldiers and settlers fired continuously into a largely unarmed gathering of the Pinjarup clan, then hunted them through the bush, so that, according to J.S. Roe, ‘very few wounded were suffered to escape.’ The subject matter of the play is tragic, but it is leavened by what Nyungar playwright Richard Walley has called the wonderful ‘humour born of the breadline, and a sense of the real worth of everyone no matter how down and out’.
The story goes that Les Quartermaine was stood over and forced to add another inmate’s signature to his painting, although this might be apocryphal. The landscape is nostalgia in its purest form, but also a holding on to a source of strength. I have seen the painting many times now, but the last time I entered the cell I was taken by surprise – tears flooded my eyes. It was a gloomy winter’s day and the cell was darker than usual, and yet the painting’s radiant light completely overwhelmed me. Prisons are the darkest of places, and yet the images of light in the artwork left behind by Peter Cameron, Shane Finn, Reggie Moolarvie and Les Quartermaine, and the prison works of Walmatjari man Jimmy Pike, each carry the illumination of sharp observation and tender feeling amid a regime of exacting control.
When my father arrived in Perth in 1960 he found a city already beginning to grow away from its river base, but with remaining tribal loyalties to the older suburbs closer to the city. These loyalties were usually manifested in a strong identification with the different Aussie Rules teams in the state football league: Perth, West Perth, East Perth, Swan Districts, Subiaco, Claremont, East Fremantle and South Fremantle (subsequently joined by the Mandurah-based Peel Thunder in 1997). Perth seemed to him relatively multicultural. The city had a large Italian, Slav and Nyungar community, many of whom seemed to play footy.
My father at that time was a young flying officer stationed out at the Pearce Air Force Base. He didn’t know anyone in Perth but had the perfect passport for entree into a sports-mad city: he’d played footy for the South Melbourne reserves in the Victorian league and for Launceston in the Tasmanian league; he’d recently won the Phelan Medal in the New South Wales league, despite being injured for half the season. Word had gotten around, and he was contacted by someone at West Perth. At the function to welcome him, there were speeches by the club president, Les Day, and the coach, former Footscray legend Arthur Olliver. Everyone made my father and the other new recruit, Collingwood star Ray Gabelich, very welcome, with invitations to dinner and drinks. Then it was straight into training, at what my father describes was a level and intensity he’d never seen before, even under Haydn Bunton, Jr. in the Tassie league. The first thing he noticed was that the sandy soil beneath the Perth ovals meant a fast track even on wet days and a game plan that suited speedsters. My father played in the centre as the replacement for Don Marinko, Jr. and speed was his big asset. And he needed it. His status as a new recruit and an officer with a double-barrelled name also marked him out for special attention – an assumption of privilege that was hugely at odds with his upbringing in rural north-east Tasmania. The second thing he learnt about the local conditions was that in the pre-season, when the temperature is often in the late thirties, it’s a bad idea to scull a glass of icy beer straight after a game: cold beer into an overheated body can cause instant paralysis. My father nearly died in the club change-rooms and had to be revived by the club doctor.
My father’s league career was ended by an errant boot at the bottom of a pack, shattering his cheek-bone and nose. He required reconstructive facial surgery, and ‘Big Bear’ Ray Gabelich and others from the club visited him often during his time in hospital, helping him through the long recovery – acts of kindness that my father’s never forgotten. He also vividly remembers some of the great Indigenous champions of the day. He played alongside Bill Dempsey and against Ted Kilmurray, Polly Farmer and Syd Jackson from cross-town rivals East Perth. Later, Kilmurray, Farmer and Jackson would be the first of many Indigenous recruits to make the journey to the Victorian Football League, where their flair and speed helped shape the game that AFL football has become.
My father is not the first person to describe to me something that he found surprising about Perth in the 1960s, what he calls the ‘wild-west admixture’ of the time. Unlike other cities he’d seen in Australia, in Perth all the classes mixed freely and seemingly without rancour and, in football season at least, so did the ‘races’. This was true at the local football games and still is. I take my son to watch South Fremantle play in the Western Australian Football League, especially the derby games against East Fremantle. The West Coast Eagles and the Fremantle Dockers may represent the state in the national competition, but in the WAFL games there is still a sense of local community and tradition. They are also far more relaxed and child-friendly than AFL games. In the breaks between quarters all the kids storm the field and play kick to kick, and punters wander over to huddle with the coaches and players and hear what is being said, or rather shouted. In the sometimes moody winter light and with the field crowded with hundreds of children and the soaring parabolas of hundreds of footys looping over and over, and the red-faced coaches shouting instructions within huddles of sometimes a hundred peering fans, the scene often resembles a Bruegel painting of a medieval public gathering.
Perth’s obsession with sport has literally shaped the character of the city. Some eighty per cent of all open spaces within the city limits are sporting grounds, which are in turn used by only five per cent of the population on very rare occasions. The first mention of sport in Perth was made in 1829 by Captain Charles Fremantle, who’d been sent ahead of Stirling’s settler ships to secure the high ground of Arthur Head, on the site of the town that would bear his name. Fremantle had fought on an American battlefield at the tender age of eleven, when he’d become for a period a child-prisoner of war. He was later the recipient of the first gold medal awarded by the Royal National Lifeboat Institution back in the old country, for swimming a rope through surf out into the English Channel to a wrecked Swedish ship. Having set up a rudimentary fortification on Arthur Head, Fremantle described in quite neutral terms the sport his men (presumably bored and pent-up after months at sea) were having slaughtering seals with tomahawks around Bathers Beach.
The first horse race in the colony took place a few years later, on October 2 1833, and further south, near where Tony Jones’s C.Y. O’Connor statue sits out in the waves. A crowd gathered in the dunes to watch the race, eat ginger bread and be entertained by a ‘lame fiddler’ until the seven Timor ponies (one owned by Lionel Samson had the name ‘More in Sorrow Than in Anger’) set off down the beach – although the winner’s name hasn’t survived.
Whale watching also became a pastime for the residents of Fremantle, although not of the kind favoured today. Shore-based whaling in Gage Roads was an important early industry to Perth’s survival, and Arthur Head was a good place to watch the whaling boats paddle out to chase and possibly harpoon the passing Humpbacks.
But all this was before the introduction of football and cricket, the former especially taking hold and consolidating community identities. Bishop Salvado, who once kept his New Norcia mission afloat by giving piano recitals to the citizens of Perth, organised a Nyungar cricket team in the 1870s. This team travelled down to the city and not only regularly beat the locals but were enthusiastically cheered on by local crowds. In Bishop Salvado’s journal, he describes:
It is incredible how much excitement the New Norcia Cricket Eleven is causing. I have not stopped anywhere that they have not asked me about the New Norcia cricketers. If they were going to compete for a Chair in Theology or Canon Law, no-one would care about them, but if it is about cricket, what can be more important? They told me yesterday people will even come from York to see them play! Just imagine what a sensation it will cause if they manage to defeat the Perth and Fremantle cricketers!
And they did, on many occasions, although the team later disbanded when their white captain-coach Henry Lefroy gave it up to concentrate on running his station, which is a real pity considering the influence that Nyungar athletes have had on football.
My father’s team, West Perth, was nicknamed ‘The Garlic Munchers’ because of its strong ethnic contingent, and the term wasn’t derogatory. He said playing against the Fremantle teams reminded him of playing against Collingwood in the VFL, because the Fremantle crowds had a similar kind of feral intensity. The old Fremantle–Perth rivalry now enshrined in the Dockers–Eagles derbies started early, and so did the animosity. Ron Davidson describes one Fremantle–Perth game in 1892 that ended in a riot when the Fremantle crowd captured the umpire (a former Perth player) and beat him up, claiming bias. One of the Fremantle officials, Harry Marshall, by day an Essex Street baker and founder of the Lumpers’ Union, shouted out, ‘Bring ’em down and go for ’em. I’ll pay the costs.’ The umpire barely escaped with his life, and only then after the intercession of a Fremantle player. Marshall was charged and put in jail. When he’d done his time he was greeted at the prison gates by a marching band and large crowd, who cheered him through the streets. Soon after, and campaigning from prison on another charge, he ran for the state government’s Legislative Council, and was elected – something that The West Australian newspaper called ‘a disgrace to the whole colony’.
I can still remember traces of this atmosphere at the games I went to with my father in the late 1970s, particularly when Phil and Jimmy Krakouer were playing. Writer and academic Sean Gorman has used football in Perth to look at local matters of culture and identity, and in his book Legends: The AFL Indigenous Team of the Century, it’s clear that respect was hard to come by given prevailing attitudes, although sport was one area this became possible. Ted Kilmurray changed the game with his invention of the ‘over the shoulder snap’ while running away from the goals, as did Polly Farmer with his use of the long handball. Then there was Syd Jackson, Bill Dempsey, Barry Cable, Stephen Michael and later the Krakouer brothers, who electrified the VFL when they first entered the competition (and are the subject of a terrific biography by Gorman, Brotherboys). And then there was that pivotal image in Australian sporting history: in 1993, in what Gorman describes as ‘both a delicately poignant moment and a statement of significant power … either Nicky Winmar’s most public private moment or his most private public moment’, when Winmar, who started his career with South Fremantle, bared his breast to a taunting Collingwood crowd during an AFL match and defiantly pointed to his skin.
It’s often said that a view of Perth is best appreciated from the heights of Mount Eliza, where you can look down into the city and observe the clouds playing across the mirrored surfaces of the glass towers massed by the foreshore. As George Seddon has pointed out, the ‘oblique aerial view’ of Perth from Kings Park, beneath the parapet of lemonscented gums that leads to the War Memorial, has been recorded by artists and photographers from the first days of the colony. Whether it’s the case that no other capital city in Australia has such a ‘constant and universally preferred point of vantage’, Perth’s ‘unparalleled visual record’ is relevant mainly because it offers not only a picture of the growth of the city at the foot of the bluff but also a way of interpreting how perceptions of the metropolis have changed over the years, and how these most often represent ‘aspiration rather than reality’.
The very first recorded image of a view from the site is a beautifully rendered painting by Frederick Garling, the official artist on Stirling’s reconnoitre of 1827. The painting depicts an open woodland that is clearly the result of Nyungar firestick practices, near where kangaroo were driven off the bluff and into the spears of waiting hunters, and near where the recently constructed steel and glass walkway rises in a graceful arch through the tuart and marri forest canopy. What is curious about Garling’s painting is that, unlike the majority of images that followed it, the view is concentrated upon the south, at the convergence of the Canning and Swan rivers, oriented towards the assumed new capital at Point Heathcote rather than the site to the east that Stirling actually chose. It was here that Stirling named the bluff Mount Eliza, after Governor Darling’s wife, another offering to the benefactor who’d made the voyage possible.
Views of Perth recorded from Kings Park focus upon the low rise that St Georges Terrace straddles, sweeping round on the left and embracing the half-moon crescent of Mounts Bay, before the river disappears behind the city, with the Darling Scarp running in a corrugated line across the eastern horizon. The early sketches of Perth amid the tuart woodland spotted with settlers’ tent and wattle and daub huts, small jetties and sailboats out in Perth Water, market gardens planted along the edge of Mounts Bay, each capture a tone of fragility and respite, the first tentative landmarks of western civilisation set against an illusory ‘wilderness’.
Subsequent images depict the disappearance of the market gardens along the shoreline of Mounts Bay, soon replaced by an avenue of cape lilacs, through to the appearance of the town’s first major buildings, although the tone is still Romantic, the image Arcadian. The elevation and the contemplative light allow the artist to frame the tranquil urban landscape from a hygienic distance, and thereby avoid the depiction of a village of expanses of hot sand between structures; the poverty of the majority of Perth’s inhabitants; the soot and grime from the coal furnaces, cement works, brick factory and train station dusted across the facades of ageing buildings. On the shoreline, disease was rife for much of the nineteenth century, due primarily to the unsanitary conditions, although according to the beliefs of the time the culprit was the miasma, the presence of foul air emanating from Third Swamp (now Hyde Park) through to Lake Kingsford (where the train station is now situated), and from the shallow and increasingly polluted waters of Mounts Bay, all of which were reclaimed to varying degrees in an attempt to reduce flooding and rectify the problem of disease. In this context, the role of the south-westerly wind in blowing away the miasmic odours, believed to be responsible for diseases ranging from dysentery to ophthalmia, gave added importance to its traditional nickname: the Fremantle Doctor.
Postcard pictures taken in the twentieth century do little to alter the Romantic perspective, although the delicate hand of the painter, so effective in capturing the almost supernatural clarity of Perth’s early morning and late afternoon light, is replaced by the photographer’s need for direct sunshine. Since the advent of colour photography in the 1940s, the pictures have maintained a remarkable consistency in their slightly over-exposed but cheerful tone. Photographs taken at night over the past decade hint at a new aspiration, suggesting a city of stimulation and nocturnal action: all neon, flashing beacons and fluorescent skyscrapers above a freeway streaked with traffic.
The images of Perth also reveal an evolution in the way that the Kings Park foreground is perceived, as well as a record of how it was transformed, according to the gardening fashions down the years. English country garden with rotundas and grottos and stone-bordered rose beds have given way to a contemporary preference for local native flora. Early nineteenth-century paintings of the park also contain idealised images of Nyungar, whose decorative function serves to reinforce the atmosphere of the pastoral idyll, while the trees are not recognisably Australian until much later. Kings Park is deservedly beloved by many, as a place where generations of children have played and adults have biked and walked, a place of celebration for families and wedding parties. The park is the site of the city’s botanical gardens and the hugely popular wildflower festival; at four square kilometres it is one of the largest inner-city parks in the world, with two-thirds of the total acreage made up of native woodland interspersed with walking trails.
What is now known as Kings Park was set aside as public lands by Stirling and Roe in 1829, although the park grew in size due to the intercession of Roe’s replacement, the Surveyor General Malcolm Fraser, and subsequently Premier John Forrest, who, urged on by his forward-thinking and botanically minded wife Margaret, expanded the park’s area in 1890 to roughly its current 1003 acres.
Margaret Forrest was a noted artist, and although born in France to a French mother, as the daughter of Edward Hamersley she was, like her husband, among the first generation of settlers’ children. Margaret’s painting career diminished after her husband’s election to the federal parliament in 1901, but she is remembered in particular for being one of the originating members of the short-lived but influential Wilgie Club (wilgie is the Nyungar word for ochre), who practised plein-air painting in the manner of the Heidelberg School, and later as president of the Western Australian Society of Arts, but more particularly for her wildflower paintings. Perth is situated in the middle of one the world’s thirty-four biodiversity hotspots. With its distinctive flora, in particular its numerous banksia varieties, there was a great interest in botanical drawings to add to the collections of various museums.
As Jan Altmann and Julie Prott describe in Out of the Sitting Room: Western Australian Women’s Art 1829–1914, after an invitation by Dr Mueller of the Melbourne Botanical Gardens, a few skilled Western Australian women were able to make a good living from botanical drawing, at a time when women were excluded from arts education in general. In particular, Margaret struck up two friendships with visiting British women, Marianne North and Marian Ellis Rowan, whose combination of detail and composition had greatly influenced the development of botanical illustration into an art form, primarily by locating the painting of flora within the broader landscape tradition. Margaret and Marian Ellis Rowan travelled extensively throughout Western Australia, but it’s one particular painting by Marianne North (now kept at Kew Gardens) that illustrates the way these artists were able to redefine a genre by painting native flora plein-air, or on the site of its discovery. North’s Eucalyptus Macrocarpa, painted in 1880, consists of the detailed depiction of the flower in various stages of undress, its sticky flowers containing hundreds of tiny floating arms like sea anemone. Because the flower is foregrounded against the backdrop of an inclined woodland, the eye slides off the image but always returns to the mysterious and vital flower that dominates the plane of view, and lends the painting a quite disorienting power. The story goes that upon hearing of the presence of a flowering Macrocarpa near Toodyay, the two women saddled their horses and rode eight hours to find and paint the tree.
The ‘Fallen Soldier’s Memorial’ to commemorate those who died in the Boer War was built in Kings Park with a view over the city, on land sacred to the Nyungar. After the Great War came the 10th Light Horse Memorial and the Pietro Porcelli– designed Jewish War Memorial. The latter’s foundation stone was laid by Sir John Monash and it is believed to be the first Jewish memorial in a public place in Australia. The defining feature of the memorialising landscape is the Cenotaph, an eighteen-metre Egyptian-styled obelisk designed by Sir Joseph Talbot Hobbs, who was a World War I general and divisional commander, as well as one of Perth’s leading architects. Hobbs’s Cenotaph was completed in 1929 and finally dedicated by Rabbi David Freedman. As Anzac Day grew in popularity the Concourse was constructed, and then, after World War II, came the Court of Contemplation, with its eternal flame set amid a pool of cool clear water, above the graven words ‘Let Silent Contemplation Be Your Offering’.
If all this seems rather elaborate, this is because the Great War affected Perth, and indeed Western Australia, very badly. The state had only twenty-four years previously received its right to selfgovernment from Britain, at a time when a majority of the population were London born, and many Perth residents still saw themselves as part of a ‘land facing west’. Western Australia voted for conscription and fulfilled its expected quota of volunteers three times over. Consequently, fully one-quarter of the troops at Gallipoli were Western Australian. With more than 30 000 men and women volunteering, the percentage of volunteers per head of population was well above the national average; this enthusiasm is expressed in the tragic casualty rate of 53.7 per cent of those who enlisted, or some 18 000 men. That was nearly half of the eligible male population of Western Australia wiped out or physically and mentally debilitated, meaning that their families also became casualties of the war. One tragic example is Katharine Susannah Prichard’s husband, Victoria Cross winner Hugo Throssell. He took his own life after the war, after she had already lost her father to suicide.
My own father is a Vietnam veteran. Because of the hostility he and others encountered upon returning home, and the sensitivities involved, we were never brought up to particularly observe Anzac Day, although he began to march a few years ago in Tasmania. However, as a child in Kings Park it was hard not to be affected by one thing more than any other: the Avenues of Honour along the kilometres of roads that curl through the park, with each of the 1500 gum trees marked by an understated plaque at its feet that details the name of the dead soldier and the manner of his dying (‘action’ or ‘wounds’). Most of the memorial trees were planted by family members, many in unison on 4 August 1919 at the anniversary of the outbreak of the war, when hundreds of the fathers and mothers and wives and children of the dead soldiers knelt in the grey sand down long sweeping stretches of limestone road.
In keeping with the tradition of utilitarian monuments, the park contains many seats and drinking fountains whose users are probably unaware of their original dedication. One the most popular statues within the park is the Margaret Priest–designed Pioneer Women’s Memorial. This nine-foot bronze mother holding her baby is surrounded by stepping stones and bubbles and jets of water, designed to represent native trees of differing heights. The memorial is built near a Whadjuk women’s place, a spring where the Wagyl is said to have risen to from the men’s place at Gooninup, and a birthing site near a scarred tree. Much loved by children, who play in its cool mists, the Pioneer Women’s Memorial stands in contrast to perhaps the oddest of Mount Eliza’s memorials, perhaps because it is not actually in the park: the Edith Cowan Clock on the roundabout outside the park gates.
Edith Cowan was the first female member of parliament in Australia, one of the founders of the Western Australian National Council of Women in 1912, and a strong campaigner for the welfare of migrants and children. She lived near the park, but upon her death her supporters discovered that her memorial could not be admitted within its extensive borders.
The debate over the location of Cowan’s memorial gives a representative picture of the struggle that she and others like her faced in the conservative Perth of the 1930s. Whether it was because she’d offended someone on the Kings Park Board due to her activism or because the board was genuinely ‘disinclined to favourably view the erection of further memorials other than national ones’, the result was that the mayor could only endorse the placing of a monument to Cowan’s memory at the gateway to the park, on council lands. Cowan’s status as a defender of the underdog was invoked, her nurturing presence as homemaker, but it was the justification of a writer in a daily newspaper that is probably most representative of the discourse of the time, the fact that above all else ‘[s] he was an excellent speaker and a brilliant thinker. She was one of the best read women in Western Australia … It has often been said that she possessed the mind of a man.’ And so the six-metre Art Deco Donnybrook-stone clock that memorialises Cowan’s service to the community, she who had succeeded in a ‘male domain’, the first public monument to an Australian woman, is actually a rather unremarkable clock tower.
I drive around Cowan’s memorial on my way into the city, often negotiating tourist buses heading into Kings Park, although I’m never able to observe the memorial without calling to mind the career of her contemporary, but sometimes rival, Bessie Rischbieth. Rischbieth grew up in Adelaide, raised by her uncle and aunt. Her uncle was a progressive politician and made sure she received a good education. She married into money, and after moving to Perth she became one of the founding members of the Women’s Service Guild of Western Australia in 1909. Alongside formidable working-class woman Jean Beadle, the first-wave feminist Guild, under Rischbieth’s leadership, went on to lobby for major reforms, which, according to historian Kate White, included the appointment of women police and justices of the peace, the setting up of free kindergartens and kindergarten teacher training, the improvement of girls’ educational opportunities, the establishment of a monthly paper, and ‘improved conditions for women in government institutions, particularly the Old Woman’s Home and Fremantle gaol, improved and extended nursing services in the state; and, perhaps its most persistent demand, the provision of a government maternity hospital’.
Rischbieth had a bitter falling-out with Edith Cowan but pressed on both interstate and internationally. Having confronted Billy Hughes in his Canberra offices after World War I, she persuaded the prime minister to appoint an alternate female delegate to the newly constituted League of Nations, among other successful measures, so that, according to writer Dianne Davidson, ‘In 1928 a visiting Victorian feminist hailed tiny, isolated Perth as “the Mecca of the Women’s Movement in Australia” and the source of “streams of inspiration and knowledge to the rest of the continent.”’
Rischbieth was trapped in Europe for the duration of World War II, but during her absence, the prime minister, John Curtin, finally instituted one of the Guild’s main demands for a universal child endowment payment. After her return, she remained active in the women’s movement, although she’s mostly remembered for an iconic photograph taken in 1964. Only months before her death, aged eighty-nine, she stood by the Swan River in bare feet and raincoat and cheerful hat, holding a brolly above her head to protect herself from the rain, while blocking bulldozers at work reclaiming Mounts Bay for the Narrows Bridge project.
In a period that tended to create strong rather than pliable characters, both Cowan and Rischbieth have become intertwined in my memory with the type of unsentimental and forthright Perth woman that I remember among the generation of my grandmother, who was herself a case in point. Despite strong ideas about how a woman should behave, and despite the limited opportunities available to women at that time, my mother and her three sisters have each remained creative and resilient and adventurous and, most obvious of all, comfortable in their own skins. Their Perth childhood was idyllic: they swam, surfed, danced, played in bands, painted, travelled and worked, part of a 1960s Perth generation insulated from the conflict and turmoil going on elsewhere in the world.
Something else that’s evident from the view over the city at Kings Park is the length and breadth of the reclaimed land that now constitutes much of the city foreshore, although the scope of this expanse of grass is most apparent when on foot, crossing the foreshore in summer, the sun belting down and radiating off the hard-baked earth.
The Perth City Council’s strategy has always been to adjust plot ratios for those developers prepared to facilitate pedestrian access and retail and dining options on the level of the street, but only recently has this been successful in terms of drawing people back into the ‘dead heart’ of the city. The revitalisation of many of the derelict buildings and alleys and arcades of the inner city, and the opening of small bars and restaurants throughout, has gone some way towards achieving this; however, one oddity often remarked about Perth is the continuing separation of the river from the city by the broad swath of grass that stretches from the freeway ramps beneath Mount Eliza to the Causeway Bridge at the other end of the foreshore, and still looks like the airstrip it once was.
If the Esplanade and Langley Park have become rarely used civic spaces over the past eighty years, this was not always the case. From 1885 until they finally closed in 1920, the Perth City Baths, with their beautiful Moorish cupolas at the end of a 300-metre jetty, were very popular. Following the closure of the baths, the equally popular White City at the foot of William Street, run by the Ugly Men’s Association (who had a smaller, but similar site in Fremantle), was a fixture from 1917 until 1929. A kind of low-fi Luna Park, at a time when Perth city still hosted a residential population of workers and their families, White City was often described as a place for the common man and woman to recreate and relax. Run as a charity, whose funds went to Trades Hall, by day White City was a fairground with all of the usual side-show treats for children, including an open-air cinema and an enormous wooden slide, but also, according to Terri-Ann White – ‘Boxing, Buckjumping, Whippet racing and Games of Chance – Housey-housey and Sweat-wheels.’ By night the dance floor came alive, and the brightly lit fairground became a place for the young to gather.
The fraternising between the young, the possibilities for gambling and, even worse, communication between whites and blacks, was what ultimately caused White City to be seen as the moral equivalent of the site’s sewage problems, caused by the high water table and the often flooding river. Stephen Kinnane’s book Shadow Lines refers to the importance of the place for enabling meetings in a space that allowed for relative anonymity. It might even be the place where his white grandfather and Miriwoong grandmother met for the first time, maintaining a love affair that survived long after A.O. Neville relinquished his power. It’s for this reason, I suppose, that while White City is largely unremembered by the broader community, it seems to hold a special place in Indigenous memories of the time.
The new Elizabeth Quay project, despite the medieval thinking behind its naming (apparently when Premier Colin Barnett told Queen Elizabeth it was to be named in her honour, she responded that she was ‘broadly in support of it’), aims to return the city to the lapping edges of Perth Water, and to bring back the pedestrians with it. I quite liked the original ‘Dubai on the Swan’ proposal put forward by the previous Labor government, with its towers and restaurants and large pool of circulating river water, although even the heavily compromised replacement design underway has been criticised for its potential to disrupt traffic – always a big no-no in car-centric Perth – and otherwise disturb the status quo.
As with every major development in Perth, the matter is bitterly divisive. Some mourn the loss of Perth city’s ‘front lawn’, where Anzac Day parades take place and an enormous suburban barbecue was recently held for the Queen, and worry that the project creates a largely commercial zone out of a once public space. Some of those who support the Elizabeth Quay development are happy to see the interests of pedestrians put before traffic, for the first time in living memory – and it’s certainly true that very few pedestrians in the city venture down to the river at Perth Water. During the state election of March 2013, won by incumbent Premier Barnett and the Liberal–National coalition, Labor leader Mark McGowan’s gambit to win the votes of those disaffected by the Elizabeth Quay plans was a vow to compromise the already compromised project and halt the development altogether; he proposed a scaled-down group of structures beside the hurtling traffic of the freeway interchanges.
Perhaps it’s true, as one senior architect I spoke to about the Elizabeth Quay project remarked, that a consistent development narrative such as ‘Marvellous Melbourne’, a response to and vision of the city in currency since the 1880s, with its implicit undertones of excellence and playfulness, might have made all the difference in Perth, too. Large parts of other cities were sacked in the name of building capacity, of course, but the scars in Perth seem to be deeper, the memories perhaps longer. The result has usually been willing compromise by tentative councils and politicians, and the kind of building characterised by the much derided but capacious Perth Convention and Exhibition Centre on the edge of the foreshore, which has variously been described as a thong, a thing, a barn, a shed, and is in no danger whatsoever of becoming an ornament to the city, in contrast to the new State Theatre Centre in Northbridge, with its finned facade and 1400 gilt bronze tubes hanging in a shimmering curtain inside, or the equally functional but visually playful Perth Arena. The Arena will stand next to the Perth City Link and King’s Square development, which aims to join King Street in the CBD to Lake Street in Northbridge.
It remains to be seen whether the opportunities garnered by the current boom will be squandered as they were in the 1980s, or whether the incumbent mayor will be supported in guiding through the many projects underway to completion, developing in the meantime a culture of risk-taking with a focus on design quality, and in doing so create a more dynamic and populated city centre, as it was before all the people left and the corporations moved in.
It’s lunchtime in Kings Square, Fremantle, and I’m sitting on a bench beneath the giant arms of a Moreton Bay fig, eating a Culley’s cheese and salad roll in a poppyseed bun. The Culley family have been baking at their High Street tearooms for more than eighty years, and four generations later it’s still a family business. I close my eyes and inhale the yeasty sweet smell of figs trodden underfoot that rises with the warmth off the brickwork, listening to the shouts of the drunks over by the library and the squeals of the children playing around Greg James’s sculpture of Pietro Porcelli, another of my favourite statues in the city.
James has captured Perth’s best-known twentieth century sculptor at work with a spatula, shaping a bust in clay; the everyman male head rests on a three-legged workbench at eye-level to its maker, bronze tools and off-cuts of clay laid beneath. The statue of Porcelli is so lifelike that newcomers often do a double-take walking past, and children are especially drawn to it, my own included, who love to reach into Porcelli’s pockets and see what other children have hidden there: wrappers, coins, bottle tops.
Born in 1872 near Bari, Italy, Porcelli arrived in Australia aged eight, with his mariner father. He studied sculpture in Sydney and Naples, before travelling to Perth during the gold-rush with his father, along with the hundreds of thousands of others trying to escape the economic depression gripping the eastern states. Pietro’s father gave up his life on the sea and instead set himself up in Fremantle on Pakenham Street as an importer of Italian goods. Porcelli junior’s first sculpture was a bust of the premier, John Forrest, although the 1902 life-sized bronze of John’s brother, Alexander Forrest, is better known. Shaped of Guildford clay before it was cast, the statue of Alexander Forrest stands on the corner of Barrack Street and St Georges Terrace, with Forrest dressed in his explorer’s kit, rather than his mayoral garb. Porcelli also carved the beautiful brownstone Celtic Cross that stands in Fremantle beneath the ‘Proclamation Tree’, planted to mark the occasion of the colony being granted responsible government in 1890. He was also commissioned to do war memorials, and my favourite is the figure of Peace trampling on a sword, before the Midland Railway Workshops, memorialising the many rail workers killed in the Great War. Porcelli’s most famous work, however, is his statue of C.Y. O’Connor on the Fremantle Quay. There is a poignant photograph of him standing beneath the clay model of O’Connor, dwarfed by the figure he’s hand-sculpted. Porcelli looks frail, exhausted and slightly awed as he stares up at the model that when cast would be praised by John Forrest as ‘thinking in bronze’.
Fremantle locals, particularly children, used to drop into Porcelli’s studio to watch him at work sculpting, carving or doing a pour – something that Porcelli apparently never seemed to mind. When I visited Greg James earlier today at his J-Shed studio at the foot of South Mole, a minute’s walk from my own studio, he too didn’t seem to mind visitors. It’s a crisp autumn day, and the air smells of saltbush and the pickled fish aroma of the aquaculture ponds across the street. As a friend of mine joked, only in Perth could a couple of overnight downpours result in the wettest March in forty years (before the hottest April on record), but the cool change and the dampness and tints of green in the heat-weary trees are welcome and refreshing. Down the beach the sculptures forming part of this year’s sculpture@bathers exhibition are positioned along the sand and through the whalers tunnel and along the limestone tracks at the foot of Arthur Head, a sister exhibition to the annual sculptures-by-the-sea at Cottesloe Beach. There’s something playfully appropriate about the scrap-metal statues of two horses gambolling on the beach; further along there’s the lone woman beside the boardwalk, resembling a wistful bow spirit staring out to sea.
James was working on his latest commission, with the wide doors to his studio open to let in the light and sea breeze, and I asked him to describe a story I’d heard from Ron Davidson. James was working on the Porcelli statue in the 1990s, grinding it off in his Henry Street studio, when he sensed someone enter his room. It was late at night but James was used to visitors entering his studio around the clock. He turned off the angle-grinder so there was no danger of sparks catching in the visitor’s clothes, only to look up and see Porcelli, wearing a blue cotton smock and baggy woollen pants, standing before him. The apparition walked through the nearby workbench on which sat bronze sections of his own torso and disappeared. It wasn’t an unpleasant experience, according to James, but, a little spooked, he still invited his neighbour in an adjoining studio to join him for a cup of tea. What James didn’t discover until later was that his studio had once been Porcelli’s, a hundred years earlier.
A story like this in any other part of the city might seem a stretch, but Fremantle’s old buildings are notorious for similarly phantasmic experiences, especially among artists who are usually the only ones working late at night. When my brother and I visited my aunt Patricia Hines at her silk-screening studio in the Fremantle Arts Centre in the 1970s, in the building that used to house the inmates of the Women’s Asylum (and a place long reputed to be haunted), we were terrified by the skull of a Batavia shipwreck victim that used to be housed in a ground-floor diorama, and by the empty corridors after dark.
I finish my roll and bin the wrapper, climb onto my bicycle and pedal across the square, casting a glance at another favourite statue of mine: the 2002 Andrew Kay bronze of Hughie Edwards, slightly larger than life and dressed in his airman’s uniform, staring up at the sky. He won the Victoria Cross and eventually became the most highly decorated Australian serviceman in World War II, but when he returned to Perth and became governor, according to Ron Davidson, none of Hughie’s achievements or wartime excitements had matched the thrill of playing six games for his local team, South Fremantle, which were, he said, ‘the most significant moments of his life’.
Cycling home to South Fremantle I pass Portuguese street artist Vhils inside a cherry-picker, working on the giant portrait of Fremantleborn Dorothy Tangney that’s going up on the wall of the Norfolk Hotel. Tangney was Australia’s first female senator in the federal parliament, a position she held for the ALP from 1943 to 1968. Vhils has characteristically worked in texture to the portrait by chipping away the layers of built history down to its gritty bedrock of redbrick and lime, in the process revealing a startling bas-relief image beneath the original layering of paint, stucco and cement. Tangney’s face catches the afternoon light and shadows her eyes, making it appear as though she’s watching the artist’s bent back as he kneels and works the chisel.
It’s getting on for late afternoon, and the light has softened across the sheoak woodland that rises along Blackwall Reach. Just out of our vision, kids are doing bombies from the thirty-foot drop into the blue river, but we’ve decided to take our own children to a northern riverbank to picnic at our favourite park. Around the corner from Chidley Point, the small wedge of grass on the edge of a newly retained shoreline is private enough to be relatively unknown, one of the reasons we like it so much. A few men in the car park are donning wetsuits and scuba gear, in preparation for a nightdiving excursion to catch prawns with scoop nets in the deepest part of the river, and Luka watches amazed as the frogmen finish suiting up and begin to test their gear.
Down the stairs by the waterline, we share the foreshore with a Nyungar family playing cricket, while Max casts a lure off the end of the jetty, soon hooking and releasing a small tailor. Luka and his sister, Fairlie, wander the riverbank looking for jellyfish in the sepia shallows, but run to the jetty when Max spots a single dolphin, swimming back and forwards through the mussel-encrusted boat moorings. A black swan paddles over to sit quietly beneath the jetty, but is soon disturbed when the giant motorboats begin to return from their day-trip to Rottnest Island. In the rush to get back to their moorings in the exclusive yacht clubs upstream, the private launches speed past the Point Walter sand-spit, disturbing the smaller boats out crabbing in the bay, lashing at the moorings of the graceful old riverboats nearer to shore and grinding over the channel where the dolphin has retreated, finally smashing the otherwise peaceful shore with thigh-deep waves. It’s the equivalent of being allowed to drive a tank down a suburban street, and a reminder that while the beach remains an egalitarian space, the river is less so. As the dusk begins to settle, dozens of the indistin-guishable white giants round the point, one after another, their crew and passengers hidden behind tinted glass. The black swan washes around in the swell, its feet cycling to avoid being tipped.
Finally the river traffic dies down, and the sun sets over the bluff behind us. In the shadows, my children climb the elderly peppermint trees, counting how long they can hang from the rough branches before dropping. We are all alone now, except for the odd kayaker sweeping home over the still dark waters. The coloured lights of the city come on, and so do the channel markers deeper in the bay. The murmuring of crabbers hauling up nets. Hoots of laughter from across Point Walter, where a fireworks barge is being set up.
Festival season is nearly over, but there are still a dozen things we could be doing tonight. Perth’s summer arts festival may be Australia’s oldest, but it gets better every year. Tonight, friends are catching bands at an all-day concert, some of the 90 000 people who’ll see music in Perth over the weekend. We’re keeping our powder dry for the Nick Cave concert midweek and don’t feel like we’re missing out.
Bella returns with the kids’ fish and chips, and while they pile in I wander over to the shoreline to sip my pale ale. I look at the quiet river and the dark ribbon of forest that runs along the limestone cliff; I smell the briny estuary settling on the evening air, ‘perfectly warm, perfectly still’. My children laugh and squabble and scrunch the butcher’s paper, and I’m brought back to them, the centre of my life these past years.
Perth is the city that I hope will nourish them, challenge and surprise them, growing – as they grow – into a city of commotion, spontaneity and opportunity. But there is more, too, if they want it. As I stand on the riverbank – lapping water at my feet, the smeary lights of the scuba divers edging out into the black depths, the smell of algae and salt and the dry bones of an old jarrah jetty, stars above me – I feel a sense of privilege, for things changing and things remaining the same, for knowing something of this place, feeling this place, and for the quiet gravitational pull of this force called belonging.